Done like a dinner over a reheated story

3 September 2003 — 10:00am

Craig Emerson has a PhD and a master's degree in economics. Over the years he's been a staff adviser (for four years) to a prime minister (Hawke), an economic analyst at the United Nations and the head of a state government department in Queensland. He is now a senior member of Simon Crean's alternative government. You'd think that says he has some brains.

Well, you'd be wrong. Otherwise, how could Emerson have made such a fool of himself on national television at the weekend? And he did, as most people who saw the regular Laurie Oakes interview on Nine's Sunday program must surely have thought. It was one of those mesmerising performances which compel you to ask of the hapless victim, "He can't be for real, can he?"

Indeed he is.

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Politicians silly enough to front Oakes and his clipboard on a Sunday morning deserve whatever they get if they have not done their homework. Emerson, clearly, had not. And he even must have twigged he should have been home watching some other dill when Oakes's first question demanded: "I suppose the Labor Party should be congratulated on this - this business of Abbott's fund? I mean, you took a story that was so old it had cobwebs all over it, pretended it was new, and kept it going for a week."

Emerson came dressed as that day's dinner with a rehearsed political message on the hated Tony Abbott and what Labor and gullible journalists kept calling "revelations" about Abbott's $100,000 "slush fund" to do Pauline Hanson in politically.

But that was all he had: a reheated story Labor was trying to sell to the hysterics, the nutters and the conspiracy theorists who fantasise that Hanson is a political prisoner when all she is is a convicted fraudster who tried to exploit Queensland's state electoral public funding to collect $500,000 of voters' money she and her grubby colleagues weren't entitled to.

After Emerson blinked, how did he reply to that first question?

"Well," he said, "we exposed the truth and we exposed the Prime Minister's hypocrisy ..." And he plunged on, trying to parrot his message, but Oakes would have none of it. He fed Emerson to viewers piece by piece.

Why had he lied? Oakes asked. Why claim Abbott had denied the existence of the fund when Abbott had confirmed all details to Parliament five years earlier? And whenever Emerson tried to change tack, Oakes would insist: "No, let's talk about what you said."

Oakes: "You accuse the other side of telling lies and being deceitful. In the same news conference, [you] said about this fund Tony Abbott was the sole trustee. Well, we've known for five years he wasn't. The other trustees, [Labor's] John Wheeldon, [a former Whitlam minister] and [the Liberals'] Peter Coleman, [a former NSW state leader], were named in Parliament by Abbott. So again, why are you misleading people?"

Emerson: "I read in The Australian newspaper on the weekend about the existence of such a fund. I started asking questions on the Tuesday." Oakes: "So you didn't know about the fund until Tuesday, even though it had been in the public domain for five years?" Emerson: "I did not know all the details." Oakes: "So before you launched into it, you didn't check?" Emerson: "I didn't know all the details."

Emerson sounded like he didn't know anything. The further the interview went the worse he looked. Oakes was relentless. "Abbott did not organise [Hanson's] prosecution," he said. "He helped fund a court case aimed at stopping One Nation getting half a million dollars to which it was not entitled. That's not the same as organising the prosecution that sent Hanson to jail ... How does someone fund a prosecution launched by [Queensland's] Director of Public Prosecutions? That's an outrageous allegation."

Emerson's problem was that when Tony Abbott began openly pursuing Hanson in June and July of 1998, after One Nation's stunning vote in the Queensland state election that year, Emerson was not in the Federal Parliament. Emerson didn't become an MP until Howard's second election campaign a few months later.

So Emerson missed Abbott's 1998 parliamentary speeches, however politically self-serving, which denounced Hanson and recounted the setting up of the "trust fund" to finance a civil action into what Abbott claimed, correctly, was One Nation's illegal registration as a political party.

All this went on in Parliament before Emerson ever got there. But Simon Crean knew and so did Mark Latham, who spoke in the parliamentary debates involving Abbott at the time. So either they've both got convenient memories and they didn't brief Emerson fully, or they're all telling whoppers.